We Will Make History

As I told you last week, a month from now, we will have our 20th Anniversary Revival Meeting. This won’t be, however, an ordinary revival meeting. But it will be special, not so much in content, but for the occasion.
Twenty years ago when we started New Covenant Fellowship Church, on the first Sunday, I preached out of Psalm 1, a sermon entitled “A Tree Planted by the Streams of Water.” My challenge then, to a handful of people who had gathered there, was to stand on the Word of God instead of any human wisdom or ability. We would strive as a church, I said, to be committed and to be faithful in teaching and obeying the Word of God. And I think we have been pretty faithful all these years since then.
The second Sunday, I preached on Joshua 1, a sermon entitled, “Joshua Generation.” The Moses generation that came out of Egypt found themselves fretting and complaining each time they were confronted with a challenging situation mainly because they couldn’t abandon their former ways of living that they were so used to. They didn’t want to deny themselves. Consequently, they ended up wandering around the desert for 40 years but failed to go in because they refused to believe God and obey Him.
The Joshua generation was, however, different. They trusted God. They obeyed Him. So they were allowed to go in and capture the Promised Land. I therefore challenged the people to rise up and face the call of God as we prepared to meet the challenges of our generation. We promised to one another that we would not retreat, because if we did, we would perish in the desert.
The group of 17 people that included my wife and I eventually went out and lived out their lives according to that conviction. Dr. Sam Chang who was our first elder and who had a PhD in Physics and worked for IBM went to China to teach at a college.  Deacon Daniel and his wife Ruth who were then an engineer and a nurse, took their young children and went to a remote island called Samar in the Philippines and have been serving God there. Deacon Charlie Whang also became a pastor. Deacon Woo Sung Kim who was an engineer also became a pastor. A young man, Soong Chan Rah, who had just graduated from Columbia University went to seminary and became the first pastor of a daughter church that we planted in Boston. Another young man, Steve Chong, who was in college at the time, also went to seminary and became a pastor.
There are, of course, a lot more people, more than 100 people since then, who have followed their footsteps and went into ministry. God did this because we were committed in what we were doing and we believed in God and we believed in one another.
Now, after 20 years, we are standing at the brink of another divine opportunity. We can either be like Moses’ generation that just wandered around aimlessly or take the land and capture it like Joshua’s generation. You can either only hear about our history as it’s been told and wish you’d been there or decide to become a “history maker” the way our first generation did.
I believe that you want to be a “history maker.” I believe that your destiny is written by God. I believe that you were born to do something great for the Kingdom of God in your lifetime.
So, I challenge you to get ready for the revival meeting. Pray for God’s revelation and anointing. Prepare to meet your destiny and hope 20 years later someone will point to you and say, “You were a history maker!”

August 8, 2010
Dr. W. Jamie Kim